Media and Publishing: Year In Review 1997

Radio

Just before the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, radio shows in Hong Kong gave mainland Chinese a taste of freedom of speech and other democratic ways by giving them a chance to say things they never could on government-run radio at home. From these Chinese callers, people in Hong Kong gained insights into life on the mainland. Radio Television Hong Kong considered itself editorially independent and wanted to remain so under the "high degree of autonomy" China had promised Hong Kong.

Vietnam announced it would step up internal vigilance and increase domestic propaganda to counter broadcast plans by U.S. radio station Radio Free Asia. A commentary in the Communist Party’s Nhan Dan newspaper described the U.S.-funded station as "an assault tool of the hostile forces."

In June consumer electronics leaders Hitachi Ltd., Panasonic (Matsushita), Sanyo, and JVC announced agreements with WorldSpace, headquartered in Washington, D.C., to develop and mass-produce a new generation of portable radios capable of receiving broadcast programs directly from satellites. WorldSpace was founded in 1990 to provide direct satellite delivery of digital audio communications services to the emerging markets of the world.

In the U.S. it was the year of Thomas Hicks in radio. The Dallas investor went on a radio station shopping spree and by November owned or had agreed to buy 418 stations, more than any other radio operator in the nation. Hicks’s binge was part of a rapid consolidation of the radio industry that began in 1996 after the government effectively eliminated most radio ownership limits. At midyear Broadcasting & Cable magazine found that 13% of the nation’s 10,273 commercial radio stations were in the hands of the 25 largest station groups. The consolidation of the industry did not escape the notice of government regulators concerned not so much with how many stations a company owned nationwide but how many it owned in a single market. In November the Justice Department filed suit in federal court to block a deal that would have given a Hicks-owned company control of four stations serving New York’s Long Island, which together accounted for 65% of the advertising revenue in the market.

Driving all the buying and selling was the healthy advertising market, a reflection of the strong overall U.S. economy. According to the Radio Advertising Bureau, August was the 60th straight month of increased advertising sales. Sales for the month were 12% greater than in August 1996.

Although it may have seemed to some that the U.S. marched to a rock beat, radio studies continued to find that country music was the most prevalent and popular radio format. According to Simons Research, some 43 million Americans 18 years or older tuned in to country each week. The runners-up were adult contemporary (36 million weekly listeners) and news/talk (31 million). The average American in 1997 listened to radio each week for 3 hours 24 minutes on weekdays and 5 hours 51 minutes on weekends, according to SRI Radio.

Amateur Radio

Despite the rise of the Internet, more than two million people throughout the world in 1997 continued to communicate over the air as amateur radio operators. Most of these hams--nearly 700,000, by the FCC’s count--were in the U.S. The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) reported that it started off the year with 175,000 members, the most in its 83-year history. Hams used their radios mostly for personal communications, but on occasion they were called on to provide emergency communications, as was the case in 1997 with the flooding in the western U.S., and to provide backup communications, as they did for the New York City Marathon. The hams also provided educational opportunities. In the fall NASA scheduled amateur communications between schools and astronaut and ham David Wolf aboard the troubled Mir space station.

Despite the number of enthusiasts and their well-documented good work, hams in the U.S. fought a seemingly never-ending battle to preserve the radio frequencies they used. In 1997 the threat came primarily from proposed low-Earth-orbiting satellites. In addition to guarding spectrum in Washington, the ARRL also successfully worked to water down a bill in Congress that would have restricted the use of scanners and affected the manufacture of amateur radio equipment.

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